SEO Tycoon

**tronicscribe** · 06-03-2008, 10:04 PM

I've read a lot of articles on SEO, and how to optimize your site so it is ready. However, I'm not sure I understand how exactly my website would get into google's results. lets say within the first 10 result pages. I have all my meta information set up correctly, with my description and keywords, but when I type in any of my keywords into google search, I'm not even on the first 50 pages. I have also read that it takes time for your site to get on google, so perhaps this is why. my site is still quite new, the url is in my sig, and only has about 400 visits since May 20th when I launched it, so hasn't even been a month yet.

let's imagine that I've been running the site for a year, and my traffic has gotten up to 2,000 visits a month. at this time would I see my website listed within the first 10 pages of google results? I'm wondering if I should stop thinking so much about SEO, and just work on social networking and word of mouth. If SEO just needs time before seeing results, then there isn't much else to optimize for it, right?

**ForrestCroce** · 06-03-2008, 10:48 PM

Your site is coming up as the first result when I type the page title into Google. What searches are you hoping to come up for?

You might want to change your title from Portfolio’s Friend to Portfolio's Friend.

**tronicscribe** · 06-03-2008, 10:59 PM

yes, I forgot to mention that it does in fact come up as the first when you type the title. but I think that goes for any blog, or website. the problem is, the title isn't really something people would be searching for. my keywords are words like, design portfolios, artist portfolios, web design, graphic design, and so on. so, I'd like people who search for those art related topics and who search for art portfolios, to get my website as a top result. but I think that just takes time, right?

**chrishirst** · 06-04-2008, 05:15 AM

Quote:

the title isn't really something people would be searching for

But the page titles should be something that people are searching for.

Other than, that it all sound perfectly normal.

Quote:

I'm wondering if I should stop thinking so much about SEO, and just work on social networking and word of mouth. If SEO just needs time before seeing results, then there isn't much else to optimize for it, right?

This is where so many get it wrong.
Optimising is what you do on the pages. Marketing is what you elsewhere.

**tronicscribe** · 06-04-2008, 04:47 PM

thanks, I forgot about the page titles. although I'm not sure how to change them in wordpress. I'll look into that. also, I understand what you mean about optimizing is done on the pages, but what if someone has a new website and has done all the optimizing they can, but google still does not bring up their page in results for their keywords? does this mean that it was not optimized correctly, or does it just take time for google to bring the website to the front of results based on how long the site has been around for?

**vangogh** · 06-05-2008, 01:12 AM

Also keep in mind you're hoping to rank well for some competitive phrases. You have a lot of competition and that competition is doing things just like you to rank on the first page.

You're most likely going to need to optimize for longer phrases that don't have the same level of competition until your site build enough links, trust, authority, etc to compete for the more generic phrases.

Another thing to consider is you don't have much text on your site. Your site is really a couple of paragraphs and a whole lot of images that link to other sites. There's nothing wrong with a site that's mostly images of course, but you're not giving search spiders a lot of information.

With the tag cloud you're creating plenty of duplicate content so you'll probably want to block all the tag URLs.

The page title is going to be the same thing as the post of page title. Look for the All in one SEO pack plugin. It lets you write separate page titles different from the post title.

**ForrestCroce** · 07:25 PM

Chris and Steve went over the title, and Steve hinted about keyword competitiveness ... but let's take a closer look.

Quote:

Originally Posted by tronicscribe

my keywords are words like, design portfolios, artist portfolios, web design, graphic design, and so on. so, I'd like people who search for those art related topics and who search for art portfolios, to get my website as a top result. but I think that just takes time, right?

You can get a better idea of how many pages you're competing against, for real estate on the first page of a search, by doing an intitle query. This is pretty crude, but the idea is that you need the text in a page's title to seriously 'compete' for a phrase or word. So, how does the landscape look? There are 2.4 million results for web design; 0.7 million for design portfolio. A lot more than the ten a serp has room for.

These are your keywords, but they're a lot of other peoples', too. Time won't put you on the first page of a search for any of these terms. As time goes by, more people will be putting up pages with their own art portfolios ... I'm not trying to discourage you, just clear this question up.

We could talk about what gets you closer to the top of the search results, but for those terms, you might as well play the lottery. More descriptive terms will give you less competition, but even better, they'll send pre-qualified traffic.

**tronicscribe** · 06-05-2008, 02:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vangogh

With the tag cloud you're creating plenty of duplicate content so you'll probably want to block all the tag URLs.

what is bad about duplicate content, and how would I go about blocking it?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ForrestCroce

We could talk about what gets you closer to the top of the search results, but for those terms, you might as well play the lottery. More descriptive terms will give you less competition, but even better, they'll send pre-qualified traffic.

so, if I change my meta keywords to something like this, "cool art portfolios collection online, designer's portfolios showcase, etc..." is that sort of what you mean by descriptive terms? also, do I need to change my meta description so that it has some of my keywords in it? because I see that when google shows a result, it highlights the keywords in the description of the page.

thanks for all the help guys, I don't necessarily need to be in the top 10 results, but I'd like to be within the first 10 pages at least.

**ForrestCroce** · 06-05-2008, 03:59 AM

Sometimes when you come up in a search, Google will display your meta description under your link. Other times it'll show a snippet of text from the page instead. It's good to write a description for each page, so that if they show it, you have something compelling to grab people's attention, hoping they click your link instead of another site. But meta tags aren't used to rank/sort search results.

Some of the more important things that help you come up a little higher in a search are having your key words in your page's title and/or a heading tag, and in links from other pages pointing to that one. There are dozens of other factors; those are the first few that jump to mind. You noticed that most sites come up for their title ... because these html elements get special weight, and also because plenty of other sites link back to them using their title as the anchor text.

A lot of people get carried away with collecting as many links as possible, from anywhere they can get them. You can use your navigation to your advantage, and leverage your other pages. And you can influence other web site owners to some extent, but only so much, and generally not the ones that will be able to help you all that much. At the end of the day, links are one of the ranking factors for search engines, but it's better to write for users, and chase links if you want to advertise.

**francis84** · 06-05-2008, 01:56 PM

If you want to rank well i a particular KW, use that KW as your anchor text anywhere: in forum sigs, etc. Thru that, you will rank in that particular KW.

**tronicscribe** · 06-05-2008, 04:26 PM

thanks to both of you. although it is hard to write for my readers because I don't have any text in my posts, only images, which is the main content for my site. but I will try the all in one seo and change the page titles. also, I'm not sure what KW is, but that's a good tip for when I learn what it is :P

**vangogh** · 06-05-2008, 07:43 PM

Search engines don't want to display the duplicate content in their results. It doesn't help the person searching to find the same exact content over and over again on a page of results.

So search engines will pick one version of the content to show and the other versions won't show. That may or may not be the page you would prefer.

The more I look at your site though, the less I think you'll have an issue with duplicate content. A few of the images may be repeated, but for the most part each page is unique.

But since you asked here's some more thoughts about duplicate content.

Let's say you have a 100 page site that has a total of 100 incoming links for an average of 1 link per page. You might have 5 links pointing to one page, 20 to another 1 link pointing to each of another 20 pages, etc, but overall 1 link/page.

That says something about the overall quality of your site. We might expect were you to add another 100 pages those pages would be accompanied by another 100 links total pointing to the site to maintain the 1 link/page average.

Now imagine each of those initial 100 pages is accessible through 3 different URLs. To real people there's still 100 pages with a total of 100 incoming links, but to a search engine there's 300 pages with 100 incoming links or 0.33 links/page. That would seem to indicate the site is less popular and important than it really is.

On a more granular level imagine one page of your site is accessible through several different URLs. Chris, Forrest, and I all link to the page, but we each choose a different URL to link to since we navigated to the page in different ways. You might think you have 3 links pointing to one page, but search engines will see it as 1 link pointing to each of three different pages. They'll drop two of the URLs from the results since they don't want to show duplicate content and the net effect is a page that should have 3 links now has 1 and won't rank as well.